Personnel agency opens second veterans recruitment office

The Office of Personnel Management announced Thursday that it is opening the second of three outreach offices intended to boost recruitment of veterans into federal jobs.

The new part-time office will be located at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. The first such center, also part-time, opened in December 2005 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington; the location of a third has not been determined.

"We are proud and honored to help those who fought and sacrificed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to find opportunities in the federal civilian workforce," OPM Director Linda Springer said.

Brooke and Walter Reed are separation points for service members about to leave the military. They also serve as rehabilitation centers for disabled veterans -- a subset to which the federal government gives an extra edge in hiring. Federal agencies are required to give some preference to all veterans when filling job openings and when choosing employees to lay off.

Brig. Gen. James Gilman, the commander of Brooke, said the office will be of special use to the disabled veterans recovering there. The center "will ease the transition to civilian life for many injured [service members]," he said.

The office will be staffed two or three days a week, and will provide soldiers with information about federal job opportunities and guidance for the sometimes confusing application process. It also will provide a contact point for agency representatives trying to recruit veterans.

Even though veterans' preference in federal hiring is required by law, many advocacy groups have criticized the government for circumventing the rule. In March, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia held a hearing to examine potential violations.

One of those critics, Richard Weidman, director of government relations for Vietnam Veterans of America, said the new Brooke center is a step in the right direction, but is hardly adequate.

"Think how big the federal service is," Weidman said. "And you have one-and-a-half people doing the whole recruitment for the entire federal government, and this is deserving of a press release and a pat on the back? I think not."

Weidman said returning veterans are the perfect candidates for hard-to-fill slots, especially in less populated areas. He said that in his group's experience, returning veterans will move home if they are single and unemployed, move to their wife's hometown if they are married and unemployed, or move to where they have a job.

"It needs to be much more methodical," Weidman said. "It needs to be built in once a person has determined they're going to leave the military. That's when the recruitment needs to start."

In fiscal 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available, 33.6 percent of employees hired into full-time federal positions were veterans. The total number of veterans in the federal workforce at that time was 453,725, out of about 1.8 million employees.